Broker@Cloud: Enabling Continuous Quality Assurance and Optimization in Future Enterprise Cloud Service Brokers

The goal of the Broker@Cloud project is to develop a framework that will equip cloud service intermediaries with advanced methods and mechanisms for continuous quality assurance and optimization of software-based cloud services. The framework will allow enterprise cloud service brokers to monitor the obligations of providers towards consumers, as well as to detect opportunities for optimising service consumption.

Motivation

As enterprises increasingly adopt the model of cloud computing, their IT environments are transformed into a matrix of interwoven infrastructure, platform and application services delivered by multiple providers.

In order to deal with the complexity of consuming large numbers of cloud services from diverse sources, enterprises will need assistance from specialised cloud service delivery intermediaries. These will need to offer an array of sophisticated brokerage services which will go far beyond the kinds of intermediation capabilities available today.

The Challenge

The challenge taken up by Broker@Cloud is to research and to develop solutions with respect to some of the most valuable and technically demanding types of brokerage capabilities foreseen for future enterprise cloud service brokers.

We envisage developing a brokerage framework which will allow cloud intermediaries to equip their platforms with advanced methods and mechanisms for continuous quality assurance and optimization of software-based cloud services. Those software-based services can range from simple programmatically-accessible web APIs, to complex software applications delivered as cloud services, i.e. on-demand Software-as-a-Service offerings.

Employing the capabilities provided by the Broker@Cloud framework will assist future enterprise cloud service brokers in providing assurances towards consumers with respect to how reliable and how optimal the delivered services are.

The goal is to provide future cloud intermediaries with advanced means of monitoring both the obligations of each cloud service provider towards consumers (as well as towards the intermediary itself), and the opportunities for optimising the services each consumer receives, as soon as these surface.

Broker@Cloud Framework

The brokerage framework, most of which will be released as Open Source Software, will comprise the following core building blocks:

1. Capabilities for cloud service governance and quality control (lifecycle management, dependency tracking, policy compliance, SLA monitoring, certification testing)
2. Capabilities for cloud service failure prevention and recovery (event monitoring, reactive and proactive failure detection, adaptation analysis and recommendation)
3. Capabilities for continuous optimization of cloud services (optimisation opportunity detection and analysis based on cost, quality, or functionality preferences)
4. Interfaces and methods for platform-neutral description of enterprise cloud services (technical, operational and business aspects, static and dynamic views)

The validation of project results will be done through two pilot case studies, during which we will integrate the Broker@Cloud framework into two different enterprise cloud service delivery platforms (CAS Open and SingularLogic Galaxy).

Impact

The results of Broker@Cloud are expected to be of significant value to the enterprise software industry, which is presently hard-pressed to understand the implications of the ongoing paradigm shift towards cloud computing, and to redefine roles and opportunities in the emerging setting. Dissemination and an open source development model is the strategy through which the consortium will seek to achieve this impact.

Broker@Cloud is funded by the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007-2013 under Objective 1.2 'Cloud Computing, Internet of Services and Advanced Software Engineering'